Senior Snowflake Platform Architect

It started with a simple idea: what if surgery could be less invasive and recovery less painful? Nearly 30 years later, that question still fuels everything we do at Intuitive. As a global leader in robotic-assisted surgery and minimally invasive care, our technologies—like the da Vinci surgical system and Ion—have transformed how care is delivered for millions of patients worldwide.

We’re a team of engineers, clinicians, and innovators united by one purpose: to make surgery smarter, safer, and more human. Every day, our work helps care teams perform with greater precision and patients recover faster, improving outcomes around the world.

The problems we solve demand creativity, rigor, and collaboration. The work is challenging, but deeply meaningful—because every improvement we make has the potential to change a life.

If you’re ready to contribute to something bigger than yourself and help transform the future of healthcare, you’ll find your purpose here.

We are seeking a Senior Snowflake Platform Architect to join our EA Data Integrations and EDW Platform Team at Intuitive Surgical. This senior technical lead role owns the architectural vision, operational excellence, and security posture of our enterprise Snowflake platform — supporting terabyte-scale workloads.

Key Responsibilities

• Architecture, Performance & Scale

• Own the Snowflake platform architecture — account topology, database/schema design, warehouse strategy, replication, disaster recovery, and multi-environment governance
• Maintain 99.9%+ availability through proactive monitoring, resource monitors, defined SLOs/error budgets, and incident response
• Optimize performance and cost at scale — clustering keys, search optimization and query acceleration service, multi-cluster warehouse scaling, workload isolation, materialized views/dynamic tables, and result/query caching
• Apply zero-copy cloning, Time Travel, and cross-region/cross-cloud replication for DR, dev/test provisioning, and business continuity at terabyte-scale
• Design Snowflake Task graphs and evaluate new capabilities (dynamic tables, Iceberg tables, SPCS, Cortex AI) for production readiness

• Security, Network, Governance & Compliance

Design the RBAC architecture — role hierarchies, least-privilege patterns, tag-based governance, masking policies, and row-level security at scale

Architect Okta SSO (SAML 2.0/SCIM) and OAuth 2.0 — federation, MFA enforcement, authentication and session policies

Design network topology and network policies for secure integrations — PrivateLink/Private Service Connect, VPC/VNet peering, IP allowlisting, and traffic segmentation across hybrid and multi-cloud environments; apply zero-trust patterns when connecting partner networks, on-prem systems, and cross-account services to Snowflake

Run ongoing network policy operations — login IP auditing by user/geography, gap remediation for offshore and international users, and iterative policy tuning against real traffic patterns

Operationalize Snowflake Trust Center — security scanners, CIS benchmarks, and detection patterns (login anomalies, privilege escalation, exfiltration indicators)

Enforce data classification and protection — PII/PHI handling, encryption, tokenization, retention/purge automation, and SOX/HITRUST compliance

Govern service account security and change management workflows across the platform

Integrate enterprise data catalog and lineage tooling (Collibra, Alation, or Atlan) for metadata harvesting and column-level lineage

Govern the Cortex AI platform — RBAC and least-privilege scoping for Cortex Agents/Search/Analyst, AI observability and quality monitoring (agent health, latency, error rate), guardrails against data leakage and prompt injection, and audit trails for agent/tool activity

Design and operate the agent observability and evaluation program — tracing, golden-dataset evaluation, LLM-judge scoring, and drift detection to ensure production agent quality

Manage the MCP Server lifecycle — tool-level access scoping, OAuth security integrations for external AI clients, and per-domain grant governance

Govern Cortex Code (AI coding assistant) usage — account/user-level credit limit policy, tiered access enforcement, and consumption monitoring across CLI/Desktop/Snowsight surfaces

Architect the AI environment SDLC — sandbox-to-production promotion model (dev/QA/prod), schema-level RBAC per environment, TTL-based data governance, and business-to-platform-team handoff process

• SQL, Python & Platform Automation

• Write expert-level analytical SQL against Account Usage views for dashboards, cost attribution, and incident root-cause analysis
• Build Python-based admin tooling — automated provisioning, role audits, compliance evidence generation, and anomaly detection
• Orchestrate workflows using Apache Airflow, Snowflake Tasks/Streams, and dbt for event-driven and incremental processing
• Build CI/CD pipelines for schema and object changes using Terraform, schemachange/Liquibase, and Git-based workflows
• Automate cost governance — budgets, resource monitors, tagging, and chargeback/showback dashboards

• Applications, Containers & AI Infrastructure

• Govern Streamlit-in-Snowflake and Snowflake App Runtime (Next.js/React) — deployment standards, RBAC, and environment promotion
• Manage Snowpark Container Services (SPCS) — compute pools, image registry, GPU provisioning, and egress controls
• Architect the Cortex AI platform — search services, Cortex Agents, semantic views, AI guardrails, and AI cost monitoring
• Enable ML feature engineering at scale via Snowpark, and provide architectural guidance on RAG patterns and emerging Cortex features

• Platform Analytics

• Architect a semantic/metrics layer (Cortex Analyst, semantic views) for consistent business definitions across all BI tools
• Integrate and govern Tableau with workload isolation and elastic scale-out to hold latency targets under high concurrency
• Design analytics-optimized data marts and medallion (bronze/silver/gold) patterns for governed, self-service reporting
• Architect near-real-time and time-series/IoT analytics pipelines using Snowpipe Streaming and dynamic tables
• Define contract-first data products — schema versioning and reliability SLAs — for BI, analytics, and ML consumers
• Establish analytics data quality and observability — dbt tests, freshness SLAs, and anomaly detection on key metrics

• Snowflake Postgres

• Provision and manage Snowflake Postgres instances — sizing, security (SSL, key-pair auth, credential rotation), and network policy assignment
• Configure pg_lake/Iceberg integration for cross-engine querying and hybrid Postgres/Snowflake workload patterns
• Monitor Postgres health — cache hits, connections, locks, and replication

• Migration & Modernization

Lead legacy platform migrations (Teradata, Oracle, SQL Server) to Snowflake — schema conversion, validation, and cutover planning

Evaluate CDC/ELT connector strategy (Fivetran, HVR, Debezium) and establish enterprise data modeling standards

• Platform CoE, Technical Leadership & Vendor Management

• Lead the Snowflake Platform CoE — best practices, reference architectures, reusable templates, and a platform knowledge base (ADRs, onboarding guides)
• Drive platform adoption — architecture reviews, guardrails, enablement sessions, and consultative support for teams building on Snowflake
• Track platform health KPIs — adoption, cost efficiency, security posture, and query performance baselines
• Serve as the senior technical escalation point and mentor team members
• Own the primary Snowflake vendor relationship — commercial terms, capacity commitments, support escalations, and roadmap/EA program participation
• Lead vendor evaluation and selection for adjacent platform tooling (catalog/lineage, CDC/ELT, observability) — RFP support, POC design, and total-cost-of-ownership analysis
• Manage ongoing vendor performance — SLA tracking, issue escalation, and renewal/negotiation cycles in partnership with procurement
• Serve as technical point of contact for Snowflake Professional Services or partner-led engagements (migrations, architecture reviews)

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years in data platform engineering or infrastructure architecture; 5+ Snowflake with 2+ in an architect/lead role
• Expert SQL — CTEs, window functions, VARIANT/ARRAY, QUALIFY, LATERAL FLATTEN, MERGE, and query profile diagnosis
• 5+ years Python — Snowflake connector/Snowpark, pandas, and scheduled automation (Airflow/Tasks)
• Terraform, Git-based CI/CD, and AWS/GCP (storage integrations, IAM, KMS, PrivateLink)
• Hands-on Okta/SAML SSO, OAuth 2.0, and network security architecture — VPC/VNet design, PrivateLink, and segmentation for enterprise integrations
• Regulated industry experience (healthcare, medical device) with SOX/HITRUST/HIPAA compliance
• Dimensional modeling (star/snowflake schema, SCDs) and TB-scale performance optimization
• AI/ML platform infrastructure experience or governed self-service AI environments
• Experience managing vendor relationships and contract/renewal cycles for enterprise data platform tooling

Preferred Qualifications

• SnowPro Architect certification (strongly preferred), Administrator, or Core
• Snowflake Postgres, pg_lake/Iceberg integration, catalog-linked databases
• dbt, Streamlit, React/Next.js (App Runtime), Kubernetes (SPCS)
• Streaming technologies (Kafka, Kinesis, Snowpipe Streaming)
• Cortex AI — AI functions, Cortex Search, Cortex Agents, Document AI, LLM/RAG architecture
• Cortex AI governance — AI observability/monitoring, agent RBAC design, data protection for RAG/search pipelines
• Data catalog/lineage tools (Collibra, Alation, Atlan) and observability platforms (Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, Splunk)

Essential Requirements

Bachelor's in Computer Science or equivalent; Master's a plus

Strong systems-thinking, architectural design, and communication skills

Security-first mindset with deep understanding of SAML, OAuth 2.0, SCIM, network security, and data protection

Comfortable at the intersection of hands-on technical work and strategic platform decisions

Due to the nature of our business and the role, please note that Intuitive and/or your customer(s) may require that you show current proof of vaccination against certain diseases including COVID-19. Details can vary by role.

Intuitive is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified applicants and employees, and prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type, without regard to race, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, color, age, religion, protected veteran or disability status, genetic information or any other status protected under federal, state, or local applicable laws.

Mandatory Notices

U.S. Export Controls Disclaimer: In accordance with the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (15 CFR §743.13(b)), some roles at Intuitive Surgical may be subject to U.S. export controls for prospective employees
who are nationals from countries currently on embargo or sanctions status.

Certain information you provide as part of the application will be used for purposes of determining whether Intuitive Surgical will need to (i) obtain an export license from the U.S. Government on your behalf (note: the government’s licensing process can take 3 to 6+ months) or (ii) implement a Technology Control Plan (“TCP”) (note: typically adds 2 weeks to the hiring process).

For any Intuitive role subject to export controls, final offers are contingent upon obtaining an approved export license and/or an executed TCP prior to the prospective employee’s
start date, which may or may not be flexible, and within a timeframe that does not unreasonably impede the hiring need. If applicable, candidates will be notified and instructed on any requirements for these purposes.

We will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records in accordance with fair chance laws.

Preference will be given to qualified candidates who do not reside, or plan to reside, in Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, or Tennessee.

This position may be filled at a different job level than listed here depending on

business need and/or on the selected candidate’s experience, knowledge and skills.

Compensation will be based primarily on the job level at which the role is filled and the

candidate’s qualifications, consistent with applicable law.

Accommodation & Accessibility Notice

Intuitive is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. If you require assistance or an accommodation during any part of the application or interview process, please contact People Services at [email protected].

We provide market-competitive compensation packages, inclusive of base pay, incentives, benefits, and equity. It would not be typical for someone to be hired at the top end of range for the role, as actual pay will be determined based on several factors, including experience, skills, and qualifications. The target compensation ranges are listed.